Posted
by
timothyon Sunday May 25, 2014 @11:30AM
from the will-ponder-this-over-some-nutria-mousse dept.

The Washington Post's Energy & Environment section raises today the question of whether the best way to control certain invasive species is to eat them. The biggest success story on this front in the U.S. has been the lionfish; it destroys the habitat of some other fish in the areas where it's been introduced, but it turns out to be a palatable food fish, too. Its population has gone down since the start of a concerted effort to encourage it as a food, rather than just a nuisance. The article touches on invasive species of fish and crustaceans, but also land animals and plants. I know that garlic mustard (widespread in eastern U.S. forests) is tasty, and so are the blackberries all over Seattle.

I am surprised you haven't heard of this term or confused in its usage. It is quite recent, fairly widespread and obvious. But just in case:

USian (Some spell it "US'ian") refers to people from the United States. Its origin is people from other North and South American countries taking offense to being grouped together with the culture/actions of the USA. Quite fascinating how politics shape spoken language!

It should be clear when you look at the work: US + ian. US stands for "United States" and "ian" is a c

I've seen that repeated many times, but I have never seen any actual figures or evidence to support it.

I doubt that very much. In order for it to be true, the average "microbe" would have to be incredibly smaller than the average human cell. Otherwise there would be no room for them all. After all, the colon is internal, and the surface of your skin does not actually add up to very much volume.

Let's hope the rest of the earth's species don't adopt this plan to control the invasive naked apes.

At a population level, the reverse might actually be true:

One of the few tactics that any species large enough to gun down faster than it can reproduce, or touchy enough that you can just set its habitat on fire, can embrace to survive, and even thrive, is to be docile and tasty. Humans go crazy for that, and promptly allocate massive amounts of effort, and delicious calories, to encouraging your population to increase dramatically. Sure, then they put a captive-bolt stunner into your brain and chop you up for parts; but being a darwinian winner isn't about quality of life...

Let's hope the rest of the earth's species don't adopt this plan to control the invasive naked apes.

Homo sapiens is pretty tough prey. We're tough enough catch and kill on an individual basis, on a group basis it becomes virtually impossible, even if you take away our technology.

The only predators that can kill humans in comparative safety are ambush predators (salt water crocodiles) and predators more adapted to their environment than we are (sharks). The former are probably the biggest man eaters on the planet and the latter don't regard us as optimal prey, because we're not energy dense enough for them (insert obese American joke here) when compared to their preferred prey.

That's completely wrong, and any expert will say so. Without our technology and herd mentality, humans are VERY EASY prey.

We have very low strength for our body mass. Compare us to chimps, cats, etc., and we're weaklings. We don't have any biological weapons to aide in our defense, either. We don't have long, hard and sharp claws, and our jaws aren't powerful enough, nor properly designed to make our teeth practical defensive weapons.

Humans make difficult prey because of technology. We're well-fed, far away from wilderness, spending the overwhelming majority of our time inside defensive structures, out-of reach of predators, and when we are vulnerable, we have high tech items like knives, keys, or sharpened sticks which make very good defensive weapons. Our herd instinct means an injured individual will get immediate help rather than being food. And furthermore, we've eradicated the overwhelming majority of large predators that could, possibly predate upon us.

You go out, naked, into the wilderness of Alaska, and see how you do up against the first grizzly bear or a pack of wolves you come across...

So without our defining characteristics, we're easy prey? Of course! Our intellect and its products (technology, shared learning, etc) are exactly what make us tough prey. Throwing someone into the wilderness of Alaska naked is not a realistic proposition, aside from the fact that our bodies aren't adapted to the cold (again, clothing is technology, and part of who we are), it's akin to taking away a snakes fangs and throwing them back into the wild.

Some animals are born with physical defenses, some animals are born with the mental capacity to build physical defenses. The former are limited to the environments where their physical characteristics give them some advantage, the latter can put themselves in virtually any environment. Sure, some individuals would fare worse than others, but we wouldn't have spread to every corner of the planet without that ability.

every year seattlites eat all the blackberries they can pick. The only thing that cut that down was when people began spraying them. But you cold not possibly get more people eating them, and that didn't dent the population in 50 years. On the otherhand no thinks of them as invasive in the sense they were not natural to live there. the pacifc northwest is berry country. Just a thorny nuisance you have to keep cut back when it encroaches walkways not unlike choking vines on trees.

They are the Africanized Bees of the Rubus World. -The nastiest thorns, crowding out the friendlier native species, but the fruits are larger and more numerous.Better than Hedera by far, but not really welcome in a balanced environment.

Plus five insightful. [wikipedia.org] Mechanical control is difficult but effective, The canes grow, then the next year they fruit, and the next year they die. It makes a hell of a mess, and gets harder to clear as time goes by, burying, then killing anything else in the area. Like Kudzu. Spraying Glyphosate is an ugly, but popular option. I favor the Flamethrower. [wikipedia.org]

I loathe the Himalayan Blackberry. The berries, while large and numerous, are bland. They store a lot of energy in their roots quickly, so once they get a foothold, they send out shoots everywhere- especially after you cut them back.

Goats are the best remedy. I had a single goat clear an acre of 8-10' tall bramble in a span of a few months. For good. They eat new shoots as soon as they appear until the blackberry roots have expended all their stored energy.

If you don't have a goat, then you must remain vigilant. I have a zero tolerance policy towards blackberries. If I see one on my property, it dies.

Given that 'being eaten' is the plan for plants that go to considerable metabolic expense to produce attractive fruits or berries, those probably aren't good candidates for this strategy. (Admittedly, humans probably excrete more of the seeds into the water treatment plant than birds do, so they probably aren't the ideal customer; but fruits are still the deliberately expendable seed carriers, not life-critical components.)

Blackberries can be controlled, you just have to invest a little time. Basically? When you pick, tie a small ribbon on the branch you got it from. At the end of the growing season, cut out anything with a ribbon on it, because that vine will never produce fruit again, it will only become a "stringer", which spreads to produce more vines.

This way, the plant can be controlled and kept to one area. But again, you have to invest time, which not many people have a lot of these days.

A cat can be substituted for possum in any recipe. You can sample a wide variety of possum and other varmint dishes at West Virginia's annual Road Kill Cookoff [pccocwv.com]. You can check Wikipedia for a summary of laws and regulations [wikipedia.org] concerning collecting and consuming road kill in other states.

Crows / Magpies / Ravens are lazy SOBs. They aren't going to solve the problem for you. As long as other meals are easier to get than toads, they will leave the toads alone. Their huge numbers and availability when other food is scare may make them a nice alternative food source, but don't think they're going to bring the numbers down to manageable levels, as long as they've got other food available.

we aren't using up any resource even in the short term. Helium? most of it just vented from natural gas wells, never collected. just a nat gas engineering problem. Potassium and phosphorous? 2.5% and 0.1% of lithosphere, just an chemical engineeing problem.

Could you cite that this is an actual Chinese saying? I have only heard this kind of quotation repeated as a racial slur by Westerners. The Duke of Edinburgh, for instances, has been reported by several sources to have once said "If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."

It's a Cantonese saying "Anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies, with its back to heaven is edible.", used in South China. It backdates to the 1800s. It's been referenced in some cookbooks (e.g. "The Chinese Kitchen" by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo), and is known/used by some Chinese, and not others.

Cue supposition based on some searching: the area traded heavily with the West during that time. Take the exotic delicacies and dishes concocted by chefs, add in a language/culture barrier,good old prejudice, and the loss of context in repetition...I can easily imagine it's a Western generalisation/mild slur that got repeated and adopted and over time became adopted as a regional motto of sorts (i.e. isn't 'known' in the Mandarin areas, just the Cantonese south).

The cow, the chicken, the pig... these animals have no natural habitat anymore really... yet are in no danger of dying of. Neither for that matter is the domesticated dog or the house cat or the gold fish.

All small endangered animals can be bred as pets or food. By all means, protect their habitat in the wild but that is no guarantee that they will survive as a species. Maintain them as pets or food in our society though and they'll live as long as we continue to do that.

As for large animals... encourage farmers to take care of a couple. Seriously, a cattle rancher could take in a few rhinos. Have a special pen for them. Make the whole thing tax deductible until there's some way to recoup the cost. These people breed BILLIONS of animals in captivity. We could do the same with rhinos, elephants, etc.

Right now one of the things hurting these species is that its very hard to legally own them.

An animal that belongs to no one will not be protected. We've seen this in Africa where the wild animals are prey for poachers. However, if you give the animals to the local villages and make the animal's survival the villager's responsibility they suddenly stop getting eaten or killed for their ivory.

This is the solution.

Anything else will likely harm these species more, waste time, waste money, and accomplish very little.

As for large animals... encourage farmers to take care of a couple. Seriously, a cattle rancher could take in a few rhinos. Have a special pen for them. Make the whole thing tax deductible until there's some way to recoup the cost. These people breed BILLIONS of animals in captivity. We could do the same with rhinos, elephants, etc.

South African farmers have realized that large animals are huge tourist draws (both for hunters and people who want to see them). There is a full auction market going on, with some groups breeding them and some buying them. Recently a Cape Buffalo stud sold for $2.6 million. Large animal breeding has caught on with a number of species.

Precisely. A book that theorized on the issue was the Phillip K Dick book "do androids dream of electronic sheep" in which most species were maintained by human beings as a kind of social obligation. It was a mark of social status to own and care for an animal. And through that they maintained many animals that otherwise would have gone extinct.

Most animals that we haven't domesticated are very difficult to domesticate. Many don't breed well in captivity, require specialized diets, etc. Even something as simple as zebras having a knack for avoiding lassos meant they were never ridden or used as beasts of burden, except in special, limited, usually ceremonial circumstances.

We've already done it to great success with the buffalo. They are commercially bred, butchered, and sold around the US. We have a few herds around the country that are each individually able to sustain the species indefinitely.

As to domestication changing the species, yes but the species would survive. Furthermore, if you were so interested in maintaining a legacy strain you could literally select for known original phenotypes thus maintaining the species more exactly as it was found then nature would itself.

No problem is insolvable.

As to the jenga tower, there are SOME species that act in that way however most do not.

For example, is the ferry shrimp found in muddy ditches in California essential to the california ecosystem? Obviously not. They could all go extinct tomorrow without so much as a ripple in our ecosystem.

Species go extinct all the time and always have and frequently there are little if any ecological consequence because there is enormous redundancy in our ecosystem.

There are exceptions but those exceptions are the exception.

An example of just such a species would be the American wolf which did serve a vital role in maintaining the populations of native herd animals.

The result of removing the wolf is that these herds do not maintain their scale naturally anymore.

The fix was to allow hunting permits thus human hunters replace the wolf's role in the ecosystem. Sadly, those hunters have a different sensibility then the wolves. The wolves selected the small, the weak, the sick... and thus helped to keep the herds stronger by selecting effectively for the large, the strong, and the healthy.

Human hunters tend to target animals that look impressive. Thus striking down many times the large, the strong, and the healthy contrary to what the wolves struck down. That is an issue and we should look into that. But it isn't insolvable.

The difference being that natural selection is a slow process. What people are doing is causing a much faster change in the ecosystem by moving species around to places they did not evolve in. What we are doing is not a natural process.

The typical muni approach is to mow it down - this actually promotes spread.Knotweed produces an amazing mono-floral honey. It compares to buckwheat honey and black sage honey.It gets a PR spin as "bamboo honey".Haven't had it as a veggie yet, but it gets some good reviews.

now I don't have a complete case history for all invasive species but I do recall reading that in one case the fish that was introduced was from the local population wanting to eat a fish that was non-native and otherwise unavailable, so they imported the live fish into the local region

That weed is at least as far west as the central plains states, and it is spreading quickly. Unless we can train some indigenous critters to start eating it our forests are in danger from what it does to the soil. Even though it is rather tasty we can't possibly eradicate it ourselves just by pulling and/or eating it.

I live in South Florida. Lionfish is available with just a short drive down to the keys. It has a good taste and even better, no guilt whatsoever. I think it's just natural that we should eat them. BTW, Florida lobster down this way (they call them crawfish up in the Northeast:/ ) were once so plentiful that it was given to prisoners. If it's edible, someone will find a way to eat them.

Here in Boston we don't have a feral pig problem, but we do have gourmet butcher shops that sell game and exotic meat. I've tried feral pig and it's good, but intense -- intense enough that I wasn't sure I liked it at first. The best way I can describe it is "extremely piggy".

I'll explain. Imagine on one hand a cooked chicken breast. Imagine on the other hand a regular, commercial pork chop. There's a clear difference between the two, but it's... subtle. Now imagine a place far beyond the other hand, where the difference is as subtle as being whacked in the face with a shovel. In an era where pork is marketed as "the other whtie meat" the distinctive flavor of pork has been toned down to the point where nobody will be offended, but feral pig is unabashedly swine-y. Not everyone will like it. By *I* do.

According to the article feral pigs reproduce so successfully in many places that it would be impossible to put a dent in the populations through hunting, but I choose to call that "sustainable". Trying to eat these animals into oblivion (if you can stomach them) is an environmental "can't lose", especially if you count the environmental cost of industrial scale hog farming. I'm very happy to pay some guy from Texas to remove the problem from his ranch and send it up here so I can put it on my plate.

Honey bees are an invasive species. They were brought to the Americas in the 1600's. Now people are panicking about colony collapse and trying to save this invasive species. I thought that is how nature works, life seeks out new and better environments to grow in. Does it matter if a bee is blown across the ocean by a hurricane or carried over by a Spaniard? Or if a mussel makes to the great lakes on the bottom of a tanker or on a piece of drift wood?

Florida has a lovely python population and they can be eaten or made into boots. We have tilapia in abundance. We have the the snake head fish from the orient as well as peacock and rainbow bass and also some species of piranha. I welcome all of these invaders. We also have armadillos and iguanas both of which also are good eating. All in all i want more. I wish the jumping silver carp as well as the big head carp would invade Florida big time. Poison toads are killing a few pets but other that and one nasty, African snail that can actually eat the plaster off your exterior walls i tend to love the exotics. They are fun to catch and some get really large. And we don't even want to get into the good things that Kudzu vine can do if properly used. We have invasive bamboos which are also wonderful.
Some items seen to be a curse tend to become valued. The dreaded zebra mussel in the Great Lakes has become a great food source for sturgeon and the water is cleaner for having them. Lampreys were cursed and considered an emergency and now people cook and eat lampreys.
Frankly i think the fight against most invasive species simply creates jobs for public employees.

Frankly i think the fight against most invasive species simply creates jobs for public employees.

That's easy to think because it's easy to forget about the species that we used to have, but don't any longer.I'm old, so I do remember the species we used to have back in the 60s. but are long gone, like the rock crab, which is way better eating than the tiny Asian shore crab that displaced it.

Another thing to remember is that Florida is a very big state, so if you simply list all the edible invasive animals, it seems like a cornucopia. But if you look at the situation in habitat by habitat, the situation looks different.The problem these things is that they don't have native predators -- they overwhelm the resources within a habitat. That means you lose everything else in that habitat that was dependent, directly or indirectly, on resources consumed by the exotic. That includes many desirable native species.

Take Tilapia. Of course the're edible, they're a popular aquaculture fish, but they're not *great* eating. They're like tofu: it's all about what you cook them *with*. When they take over a body of water, they displace native fish that are actually *better* eating. So instead of a nice bass, you end up catching a mediocre white fish you can buy cheaper than bait at the supermarket anyway.

Or Asian carp. They are indeed edible, in fact good if you know how to prepare them, but they also displace many, many desirable native gamefish: bass, crappie, catfish, trout and salmon, all of which are superb eating. For a whole list of edible animals you might not be aware of, you get one in their place. That's a raw deal.

The majority of invasive species in Minnesota (other than fish) are pretty much inedible, because they were brought here by accident (emerald ash borer) or as decoration (eurasian water milfoil, buckthorn, etc), and were never intended to be a food source

1. Invasive species cost money to get rid-of.2. People pay quite a bit of money for good-tasting food.

Making invasive species valuable can make-up the shortfall for governments being unwilling to spend the requisite amount of money needed to deal with them, but it doesn't NEED to be "food".

Figure out how to make cane toad carcasses into fashionable ash trays, or kudzu into motor vehicle components, or anything else people are willing to PAY FOR, and you'll solve the problem. A better solution would be fo

The first two invasive species that I can think of, off the top of my head are kudzu and zebra mussels.

Kudzu : AKA "the devils ivy" and "the vine that ate The South" I used to work in the landscaping business and have actually sold this stuff as an indoor decorative plant. I'm pretty sure that people taking it home and putting it in their yard instead is why we're seeing it up in Canada now. Out of curiosity, I've actually tasted kudzu leaves and it's not something I'd ever want in a salad or stewed greens. (but other people enjoy the taste of say grape leaves, so that doesn't completely rule it out.) There are apparently uses for the starch derived from the roots, but I have no experience with that.
The damned stuff grows faster than goats can eat it, which is saying a lot. It grows so fast that in ideal conditions you can SEE it growing, you'd almost swear it was capable of following you. I think the best use isn't as food, but as biomass stock. The problem with using it as biomass is that it exhausts the soil pretty quickly.

zebra mussels. As far as I know, in the areas infested by them, the mussels are not edible because of the various nasty things they filter out of the water and sequester in their tissues. I don't think ANY Great Lakes shellfish would be edible for that reason. It used to be you couldn't eat any fish caught in the Great Lakes, especially the lower lakes, because of industrial nasties like mercury and dioxin accumulation. I seem to recall that white fleshed fish species are safe now, as an occasional menu item only. Filter feeders from the Great Lakes, especially if eaten regularly like we'd have to do to keep them under control, is probably still a Bad Idea (TM Animaniacs)

Overall; my concern is that deciding to eat the invasive species is tantamount to an admission of defeat. It's certainly a step towards learning to simply accept that they are part of the local food chain. I am not an ecology and conservation expert by any means, but I think with at least some of the invasive species we may still have a shot at eradicating them if necessary. (if Monsanto or Dupont manage to come up with a kudzu specific herbicide that degrades elegantly/cleanly they'll make a mint down in the southern US)

my concern is that deciding to eat the invasive species is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

While I don't think that we should accept the status quo of irresponsibly introducing invasive species to our local environments, I think it's a wonderful idea to try eating our way out of the problems we've already created. For example, the Northern Snakehead is a recent and particular problem in my region (Washington D.C. Metropolitan area) and, coincidentally, is quite tasty. If we

Wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) are considered an invasive, noxious species to be destroyed on sight. But why would you want to destroy something so very delicious and tasty? I have some growing on my property that drove all my fancy named cultivars to extinction, and good riddance. These berries are better tasting anyway, and the seeds were free from heaven above, or at least a bird's cloaca from above. Bird shit never tasted so good.